With the recent crash of the Nepalese airplane, I saw a lot of comments on :reddit-logo: talking about how Nepal has poor safety standards, bad piloting certifications, and how they buy second to third hand planes that they don’t maintain.
I’m sure that has nothing to do with capitalism.
But I also saw comments about how Euro and American standards are much, much better. I’m sure that’s true to some extent, given how many airplanes fly over these regions with so few incidents. But… I don’t really see why.
Wouldn’t the center of capitalism be more aggressive with its cost-cutting measures and safety shortcuts? It would improve their profit margins and given the Tendency, they have to take every chance they get, right?
Are we just waiting for a huge, huge sudden spike in airplane crashes as these measures start catching up?
Or is government regulation (and enforcement) still somehow strong in this industry?
On the one hand, big planes are very, very safe.
On the other, small planes (anything with a single engine especially) are not.
On the third hand, even for big planes there's downwards pressure (because capitalism is in the process of eating itself) on maintenance standards that's only being held at bay by institutional memory and the fact planes have now crashed in pretty much every way it is possible to crash and are designed to not do those things.
How good are pilots/air staff at fixing anything that goes wrong mid air?
Very very. Competition to become a commercial pilot is stiff, super expensive, and training requirements are very focused on impossible failures and what to do. You also spend a long time as Co-Pilot and a long time working your way up the airlines and planes to the major carriers. Anyone piloting an Airbus 380 is very, very, good at what they do and have sacrificed money, relationships, and ordinary sanity over decades to fly it over all other things.
Much like train drivers and musicians, a concerning number of Pilots have commercial flight simulator setups as their primary hobby. They go home, and then they fly more.
Honestly I'd probably trust a major commercial pilot to fly the Space Shuttle over a military one (That said many military pilots become commercial pilots.)
That’s reassuring. Thanks! :soviet-heart:
Well it really depends. Could be anything from broken in flight entertainment system to structural failure. Also depends on when it happens. Generally the higher up the better, except for fires.
I would say that in the vast, vast majority of mechanical or electrical failures, the worst case scenario is the plane gets written off and you get a few bruises. Critical systems have multiple redundancies built into them and if they all fail at once, you're having a really bad day.
We all know the 737 Max fiasco, but inherent design flaws have been pretty rare this century. You just have to trust that the mechanics know what they're doing. The biggest cause of accidents is pilot error.
The tvs can cause an airplane to stall???
Sorry for the confusion I was just using it as an example of a minor issue. Although hypothetically if you out a lot of tvs in the wrong place you could cause a center of gravity issue which could lead to a stall.
Aviation nerds will note that technically speed has nothing to do with it, but as a corollary anything that makes the plane go slower and the nose go higher increases the risk of a stall.
With most modern airliners it is almost impossible to put it into a stall situation. I believe the ATR 72 plane in this crash had a "stick-pusher" to physically stop you from pulling the nose up any higher, requiring about 70lbs of force to overcome.
Small plane accidents are more due to the demographics than their designs. With GA in the US it's basically the same 5 mistakes over and over again and we keep making them. It's just that the folks who think it's fine to fly right through a thunderstorm don't tend to make it to the airlines.
Yes, that's true, but there's also the fact that an Airbus 380 is just inherently going to have a better time in said thunderstorm for the same reason it's better to be on the Queen Mary in a storm instead of the world's best built ocean racing yacht.
True. It's about knowing the limits of the plane. Plenty of bourgeois boomers get themselves and their families killed every year with their macho attitudes.